The War of the Roses (12 page)

Montague and Northumberland enabled Edward and his small army to move on southwards and gain more recruits than they had done in York, building up their force until they could challenge Warwick. No major pro-government peers came in to support Edward, although his East Midlands ally Lord Hastings' supporters brought recruits; the Duke of Somerset had gone to Dorset to meet Queen Margaret and the pro-Lancastrian Dukes of Exeter and Oxford fled south to join Warwick. The latter, evidently fearing desertions, refused to fight and stayed immobile in Coventry, probably to await Clarence's arrival with his tenants to make his army larger. But when Clarence arrived from the south-west on 3 April he joined Edward and Richard of Gloucester near Burford. This crucial defection boosted Edward's army enough for him to risk leaving Warwick undefeated behind him and head for London, where he arrived without resistance on 11 April. Archbishop Bourchier of Canterbury (who had crowned Edward) and most of the other civilian government figures stayed to welcome Edward; the only pro-Henry VI figure of importance left in the capital, Warwick's brother Archbishop George Neville of York, tried parading Henry VI through the streets to win support but was treated with indifference. Apparently, according to Warkworth's chronicle, the time-serving Neville then entered into secret communication with Edward and agreed to keep Henry secure and out of sanctuary until the Yorkist army arrived to recapture him.
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Had Neville had the loyalty to take Henry out of danger to join Warwick in the Midlands or to wait for Queen Margaret in Dorset, the King would have had a reasonable hope of escaping abroad as his cause collapsed. He would have been a poor figurehead for a declining and militarily lost cause with Prince Edward dead, but would have been able to live out his final years in peace (perhaps in France). But Neville, more of a politician than a cleric, took care of his own interests instead, and duly survived the ruin of his brothers' cause to keep his archbishopric for the rest of his life. Deprived of his chancellorship again so probably not trusted, he was arrested on suspicion of renewed contacts with his exiled brother-in-law Oxford in April 1472, deprived of his revenues, and locked up in Hammes Castle near Calais (safely out of England) until Oxford was in custody and it was safe to release him in 1474.
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He died in obscurity in 1476.

When the other Neville brothers, Warwick and Montague, finally joined armies and confronted Edward at the battle of Barnet (Easter Sunday, 14 April), they were without a significant part of the Lancastrian forces as Somerset (and Warwick's veteran captain Sir John Wenlock) had gone south-west to meet Queen Margaret at Cerne Abbas. Ironically, she landed on the same day as the battle. Had she and her French mercenaries had time to reach London and join Warwick things would have seemed much more hopeless for Edward, who had around 9,000 men but probably the smaller army. Indeed, her failure to return to England sooner, as expected (Warwick had gone to Dover to meet her in February), was a disaster for her cause. It may have doomed her husband, who was left in the treacherous Archbishop Neville's hands in London, and it left the Lancastrian armies short of leaders and troops; Somerset, for example, was not able to fight at Barnet. It also kept her warlike and possibly inspiring teenage son, a useful rallying-point for his family's cause, away from the main Lancastrian-Neville grouping at the Court in London in the crucial early months of 1471. (On the bonus side, her absence helped to avert a clash between her, Warwick, and Clarence over patronage.) Her party, in fact, boarded their ships at Honfleur on 24 March, to be held up by northerly winds until 13 April; the factor of an adverse wind thus arguably seriously weakened the Lancastrian cause in 1471 as it undermined King Harold's chances of defeating the Norman invaders in 1066.

At the battle of Barnet, the two ex-Yorkist Neville peers were finally defeated by their royal cousin Edward IV. Montague was killed along with Warwick after a hard-fought hand-to-hand combat in early morning fog–and as his body was discovered to be wearing Edward's heraldic device under his armour he may have been considering changing sides again. Thanks to a muddle in the thick fog, Warwick's possession of a large, coherent army did not secure him victory despite his men pressing the Yorkists back alarmingly at one point. His right wing under the Earl of Oxford drove their opponents off the battlefield, leading to panicking fugitives fleeing back to London crying that all was lost, but as Oxford returned to the battlefield Warwick's men mistook their ‘Silver Star' banner for Edward's ‘Sun in Splendour' and fired at it. Oxford's men attacked them or fled, securing Edward the vital chance for an assault and victory.
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The Duke of Exeter was wounded and captured, and some surviving Lancastrians were able to escape to Dorset to inform Queen Margaret of the disaster.

Edward was then able to catch Queen Margaret's army at Tewkesbury as it headed for the Severn valley to link up with Jasper Tudor's army in Wales, having left Windsor on 24 April after the St George's Day ceremonies to head for Malmesbury. Initially, a clash east of Bristol at Chipping Sodbury on 1 May seemed probable and Edward drew his army up there. But the Queen chose to avoid a clash, withdrew her men from Bristol without Edward's scouts finding out quickly, and raced north to secure Jasper's assistance; she was at Berkeley that evening while Edward was still waiting for battle.
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Edward headed the Queen's army off the Severn crossings in time in a desperate race across the western Cotswolds, luckily managing to send a force ahead to secure Gloucester where she arrived early on the 3rd. The Queen had been able to raise local troops from the Beaufort and Courtenay estates in the south-west, and had received support in Bristol; more time would have made her even more formidable. Instead, the arrival of the victorious royal army meant she had to retreat from a direct confrontation and try to link up with the Welsh levies. Luckily Edward was only a few hours behind the Queen's army, giving them no time either to rest or to secure a Severn bridge once they failed to secure Gloucester. Instead, the Lancastrians arrived at the next town and bridge upstream (Tewkesbury) later on 3 May with the enemy so close behind that they had to stand and fight. The resultant battle in the water-meadows saw both sides exhausted from the pursuit but Edward's with the advantage of a recent victory to boost their confidence, and the Lancastrians made more mistakes as Somerset (possibly goaded by Edward's artillery) abandoned his strong defensive position in front of the town to attack southwards across open fields. This advance brought his right wing within reach of a Yorkist force hiding in a spinney adjacent to the battlefield, who then emerged to take him in the flank. The Lancastrians were pushed back, and in the resultant chaos one of their generals axed Lord Wenlock, claiming that his failure to back up the attack meant that he had been bribed. The Queen's army was destroyed, and Somerset and other leaders captured hiding in Tewkesbury Abbey were dragged out and hastily tried by a ‘kangaroo court' before execution (4–5 May). Prince Edward was killed either in the battle or in the ‘round-up' afterwards (according to Warkworth calling out for help to Clarence),
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Queen Margaret and Anne Neville were taken into custody at a nearby priory, and with them dealt with the captive Henry VI's death was announced within hours of Edward's return to London on 21 May. The blatant nature of Henry's convenient demise was obvious, though it was arguably politically ‘necessary', and it was later claimed to be the first of the future Richard III's murders. In 1483 the French historian Philip de Commignes heard that Richard (as Constable of the Tower) had either done the killing or watched it; Robert Fabyan, a London chronicler, heard that Richard had stabbed Henry and the ‘Croyland Continuator' recorded that Henry was found dead and Richard was blamed for it. Edward almost certainly ordered it, though Sir Thomas More (a generation later) claimed Richard had acted alone.
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A final descent on London by yet another army of Kentish rebels, led by the Nevilles' naval commander the ‘Bastard of Fauconberg' (son of Warwick's late uncle), was driven off in time as Edward arrived back in his capital.
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This left only Jasper Tudor and his young nephew Henry (who fled to Brittany and were interned) and the fugitive Earl of Oxford at large to rally the Lancastrian cause, and Oxford was to be captured on landing in Cornwall in 1474.

Edward was thus able to pick off the various Lancastrian armies one by one and kill off almost all their leadership from March to May 1471, securing the Yorkist cause for another fourteen years. But he could easily have been trapped and defeated or killed during the first weeks of his invasion, failed to win over Clarence, lost at Barnet, or faced a more dangerous combination of Warwick and the Beauforts or Queen Margaret and Jasper Tudor. Not all invasions of an area safely remote from London succeeded in the mid-fifteenth century civil wars; Henry Tudor (later Henry VII), not a crowned king like Edward IV but facing a controversial usurper and allied to the partisans of the deposed Edward V in autumn 1483, was forced to abandon his landing in the south-west. Edward IV owed his success to the fatal ‘fault-line' in the unwieldy alliance of Nevilles and Lancastrians, as personally exemplified by Clarence, and the unwillingness of two men who he had helped generously in the past–Montague and the fourth Earl of Northumberland–to confront him in arms in early-mid March 1471. But the number of peers who refrained from either boycotting the ‘Readeption' of Henry VI or from aiding Edward as he landed showed that politics were now so unstable that many senior figures preferred to stand back and wait for a clear victor to emerge before committing themselves. That phenomenon was to reappear in 1485 and 1487, as the number of magnates fighting for or against their king during an invasion was notably small–and the confused state of rightful possession of the Crown after three reversals of occupation hardly gave confidence in any particular possessor of power.

 

The roles of Edward's brothers had he been killed in 1470–1

Edward's still-loyal brother Richard (later Richard III) was only eighteen in October 1470. If he had escaped alone, was he willing to take the risk of returning to claim the Duchy of York as his hereditary right in 1471 without nominally threatening the Crown at first, as Edward did? The technical heir to the Duchy of York had Edward been dead would have been his infant son, hidden in sanctuary at Westminster and no doubt barred from the claim, and after him Clarence–but giving the York lands to Clarence would have made him nearly as powerful a magnate as Warwick so Queen Margaret is likely to have blocked it. (Her men killed Clarence's father and brother Edmund in 1460; she had no reason to trust this rival to her son as Henry VI's heir.) The York lands were likely to have been a bone of contention between the rival factions at a Lancastrian court in 1471,and perhaps to have been divided up among several leading magnates. But would Richard have won enough adherents in invading, especially Clarence, and have won at Barnet without the military experience that Edward had? Edward nearly lost to Warwick at Barnet, until the latter's troops got muddled in the fog and fired on each other. If Edward had been killed in flight or in prison in 1470, Clarence would have been the Yorkist heir and may well have been trying to secure the Duchy of York for himself from Henry VI's ministers as Richard was landing. If the Lancastrian leadership had refused to grant Clarence what he wanted, he would have been likely to join Richard–but the question of the York lands may well not have been settled by the time Richard invaded, with Margaret not yet landed. Thus Clarence would not yet have been finally alienated from Lancaster. Would Richard have risked an invasion in order to muster troops before Margaret returned as Edward did? It is more likely that Richard, an untried youth of eighteen, would have waited until a breach between Clarence and Henry VI over the succession to the throne (and/or the Duchy of York) and then aided his brother in revolt. Thus even if Edward had been killed in autumn 1470, a split among the Lancastrian ranks could have led to Richard invading in 1472 or 1473.

If Richard had been killed too in 1470, would the unlikely alliance of the triumphant Warwick as Henry's restorer and Queen Margaret of Anjou–who had murdered Warwick's father in 1460–have been likely to last? Margaret's son Edward was rumoured by the Yorkists not to be Henry's as he was incapable of siring a son, so his succession to the mentally feeble Henry would have been controversial. Margaret had every reason to fear Warwick as much as she had done York in the1450s–not least as he had married his elder daughter to Clarence, her son's rival. Besides that, Clarence may have been endeavouring to secure a promise of the heirship to Henry in return for his allegiance to the rebels and was apparently accepted as the heir after Prince Edward. Margaret's Beaufort allies would not have allowed that to continue once the Lancastrians did not need Warwick's immediate support against a Yorkist invasion.

Edward IV, if still alive and in exile after 1470, could be written off by Lancastrian propaganda as a claimant with the story that his mother had committed adultery with the archer Blaybourne so he was not the son of the Duke of York and thus Clarence was the legitimate heir. This story first surfaced in 1483, or possibly in 1478 when Edward's mother, Duchess Cecily, was furious at Edward killing Clarence, but may have been current earlier as gossip. Margaret would have defended the rights of her son as Henry's heir and sought to oust Clarence, and a clash between her and Warwick would have followed with a vicious court struggle between their partisans over control of the supine Henry. The Beauforts and Jasper Tudor would have been likelier to back Margaret than Warwick on account of the ‘blood-feuds' between Warwick and their families (Warwick had been involved in the death of the Duke of Somerset's father at St Albans in 1455, and the Yorkists had executed Jasper's father, Owen, at Hereford in 1461).